Japanese Man Exploits Free Company Electricity to Make $500 Secondary Income Mining

Trading isn’t the only way to acquire crypto. Daily SPA, a Japanese media outlet, has reported on a Japanese man using his company dormitory’s free electricity to mine cryptocurrencies without asking permission.

An Extraordinary Income

“Virtual currencies are processed cryptographically,” Sora-san, a Japanese man working in a major Japanese manufacturing company explained to Daily SPA. “A miner is the machine that supports this encryption process. If you mine Bitcoin, you can process 12.5 bitcoins in 10 minutes, which would be the equivalent of 10 million yen, (US$ 90,000). If you mine Ether, you can make 3 ether worth 200,000 yen (US$ 1,800) in 10 minutes.” he added.

But Sora elected to do things differently than everyone else in order to drastically reduce the costs of mining in Japan.

“Because mining requires a huge amount of electricity, the common sense would be to do mining businesses in Mongolia or China, where electricity costs are very low, compared to Japan. But I live in a company dormitory. My electricity costs are null. I thought, I gotta take advantage of this opportunity,” Sora said.

Right now, Sora can mine 0.8 ether in a month. Once converted into fiat, he makes 50,000 yen ($500) as a secondary monthly income. “Once it’s set up, I don’t need to do anything, I just let the machine run on its own. It’s really a ‘free’ income,” Sora explained.

The man started to mine crypto in his dormitory room about six months ago. He said he first investigated the limit of electricity, if any, he is allowed to use for free. With the collaboration of his colleague, he bought a bunch of dryers and let them run all day and all night. “I was worried that the dorm manager would notice it,” he said, “but I was able to figure out the amount of usable watts.” He said he calculated that it would cost more than 20,000 yen ($200).

“Now that I found out that I can mine in my room, I am planning to extend installing miners in the rooms of my close colleagues,” he said, laughing. Because the company dormitory includes 100 employees, even if the electricity bill rises a little, it won’t get noticed, Sora believes.

What do you think of this man mining in his dorm room in Japan? Let us know in the comments section below.

Nathalie Stucky is a Tokyo-based Swiss journalist. Prior to joining the Bitcoin.com news department, she was a freelance journalist and contributor at The Daily Beast and Japan Subculture Research Center.

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